7970m and SC2 - network spikes?

Hey I've posted this same post in the Starcraft forums, but I'm not sure if this is a Sager or 7970m specific problem, so I figured I'd ask you folks too.

I haven't played SC2 in ages, but am coming out of retirement for HotS. I got a new computer since I played last (see sig) (my old laptop was a crappy toshiba with a nvidia gt 330m and it never had this problem) and when I installed SC2 and HotS today I pulled up a custom game to shake off some of the rust. While playing I kept getting little lag spikes - note this was just a 1v1 vs ai, a custom game. I did ctrl alt f and saw I was getting 60 fps, but the "network spikes" was going off the chart. I got up to 10 network spikes after just a minute or so. These are extremely annoying and I can only imagine playing multiplayer with these.

I get these both at home with a crappy DSL connection and at a local university with a great connection.
I've adjusted the graphics settings from the best to the worst settings, but my computer should easily be able to handle this game. If needed I'll post my DxDiag

One thing that comes to mind that I kind of saw in some other posts is that I have an ATI mobility card (the 7970m) which has graphics switching to conserve power between the integrated and dedicated GPUs. Would that be a problem? The switching software from ATI is only sub-par, but the card has been out for a year now, so I hoped that it would be able to handle a popular game like SC2.

I've tried playing starcraft custom games on and off for about a week and have this issue every time, so I'm not convinced it's a server issue. I have tried various times of the day over several days

thanks in advance. I'd love to get back in to SC2, but no way I can live with those network spikes!

thanks in advance

 

Might be a DPC latency issue. You can refer to this site for info and a tool that will allow you to assess and possibly fix it, if that's the case. Good luck!